Discussion

Yet, regulatory and governance changes affected changes. The change from a deficit guarantee to a subsidy and the financial crisis of the 1990s was key in making the organisation more cost focused. The introduction of service contracts facilitated responsibility accounting, which increased AirGreenland’s ability to calculate the profitability of business units. These changes affected the development of an increasing profit consciousness and accounting use.

Despite these measures the governance perspective cannot exhaustively explain developments.

The regulative level emphasised social concerns and intervened in operations. Priority changes came from management repeatedly seeking to secure the transatlantic route over the years. Thus, management was also an actor actively seeking to change the airline in direct contradiction with the board. Principal-principal problems (Berglöf and von Thadden, 1999) where owners disagree about key issues – such as the transatlantic route – hindered domination by the private shareholder SAS and the board’s ability to generate impetus for change was mired.

The paper also extends institutional theory, which argues that changes in organisations and to management accounting come about when an organisation enacts institutions and routinizes institutional changes into practices. For AirGreenland, however, this impetus was sought implemented through a mix of regulations, and Greenland society as well as the board was marked by structural contradictions. Three types of structural contradictions were particularly pronounced. Firstly, the period from 1979 and onwards was marked by a strong push for independence from the Danish state and SAS. Yet, SAS was owner of AirGreenland and later controlled ticketing financial accounts, and Greenland received substantial subsidies. Secondly, the government and society in general pushed AirGreenland to think in terms of efficiency and at the same time AirGreenland was expected to take considerable social concerns into account and politicians reverted decisions that aimed at improving efficiency. Thirdly, there was a contradiction between a drive towards more market-based reforms as evidenced in the call for

‘open skies’ and the use of service contracts from 2001, which increased competition for AirGreenland while politicians kept intervening in AirGreenland, allegedly for political ends and favours. Thus, the institutions affecting AirGreenland rested on contradictory signification, domination and legitimation structures.

This article 10.1108/JAOC-02-2016-0009 is © Emerald Publishing Limited and permission has been granted for this version to appear here. Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Here, a different strand of institutional theory argues that decoupling is the observed response in such instances. While decoupling probably was an important explanatory factor in stalling accounting and organisational change, profound changes, nevertheless, took place as a result of actors seeking to change the organisation.

The paper extends the critical literature in two ways. The critical literature based on Uddin and Hopper’s (2001) model, which largely predicts that development, is unsuccessful leading to politicised states of market or state capitalism. It further argues that actors have “low institutional capacity to deliver change” (Hopper et al 2009; 496). The unique case of AirGreenland illustrates different development patterns and the paper’s analysis extends the critical perspective in two respects.

Firstly, actors sought to affect the political and institutional level. The contradictions between transparent market-based reforms and political intervention lead to conflict as the modernisation and development of AirGreenland had installed more profit conscious and meritocratic structures within the company. In the 2009 election the attempt by the governing party to install one of their members on the board was hindered by employee representatives on the board, the CEO and public uproar, which eventually lead to the politician’s resignation.

How much this incidence affected the election, which was in progress at the time, is difficult or impossible to discern. However, it is clear that it was part of the broader social debate about nepotism within society, which was a key factor in the change of government. This finding extends critical research through illustrating how actors may affect developments. It furthermore supports Uddin and Tsamenyi (2005) argument that power is dialectic (ie. That power always is a relation where the weaker part has influence on events) and extends it through illustrating how the SOEs not just may control own management accounting procedures but may also affect the governance structure (choice of chairman) and macro institutional level (fighting nepotism and affecting elections).

This article 10.1108/JAOC-02-2016-0009 is © Emerald Publishing Limited and permission has been granted for this version to appear here. Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Secondly, the case lends some justification to a positive view on development. In the period analysed changes towards more transparent, profit conscious and efficient operations were taken and fight against nepotism was evident. These developments seen from a governance perspective are likely to benefit the Greenland society as they may reduce subsidies and resources allocated to the sector. The development, however, is not clear-cut. Events following data collection for this paper indicate that things haven’t changed fundamentally. The former head of the Greenlandic government had to resign due to the misappropriation of public funds and the former CEO of Airgreenland at the time of the fight with politicians had inappropriately improved his CV through listing exams that were not completed. For this reason any developmental optimism is based on the changes to legitimation and signification structures pointing towards modernisation rather than an actual change towards a modern (welfare) capitalistic system.

These discussions point to change and development being a process that neither flow from the institutional level and then becomes institutionalised nor are change solely dysfunctional or ascribable to actors circumventing and producing structures. Change is rather a complex process where contradictory institutional input creates a space where actors are able to develop and change systems and structures. The development of management accounting thus seems to necessitate that change is analysed on a structural, institutional level as well as through the actions of actors seeking to affect development – i.e. through the duality structure (Giddens, 1984) where both (contradictory) structures and institutions as well as actors’ enactment and production of structures are analysed.